I sent my letter, and waited. I got no answer. The weeks
rolled on, and the months. It was palpable, that delays which
had kept back one letter for a year might affect the delivery
of another letter in the same way; but it is hard, the
straining one's eyes into thick darkness with the vain
endeavour to see something.
The months were outwardly gay; very full of society life,
though not of the kind that I cared for. I went into it to
please mamma; and succeeded but partially; for she insisted I
was too sober and did not half take the French tone of easy,
light, graceful skimming over the surface of things. But mamma
could be deep and earnest too on her own subjects of interest.
The news of President Lincoln's proclamation, setting free the
slaves of the rebel States, roused her as much as she could be
roused. There were no terms to her speech or my aunt Gary's;
violent and angry against not only the President, but
everything and everybody that shared Northern growth and
extraction. - How bitterly they sneered at "Massachusetts
codfish;" - I think nothing would have induced either of them
to touch it; and whatsoever belonged to the East or the North,
not only meats and drinks, but Yankee spirit and manners and
courage, were all, figuratively, put under foot and well
trampled on. I listened and trembled, sometimes; sometimes I
listened and rejoiced. For, after all, my own affairs were not
the whole world; and a thrill of inexpressible joy went
through me when I remembered that my old Maria, and Pete, and
the Jems, and Darry, were all, by law, freed for ever from the
oppression of Mr. Edwards and any like him; and that the day
of their actual emancipation would come, so soon as the rights
of the Government should be established over the South. And of
this issue I began to be a little hopeful, beginning to
believe that it might be possible. Antietam and Corinth, and
Fredricksburg and New Orleans, with varying fortune, had at
least proclaimed to my ear that Yankees could fight; there was
no doubt of that now; and Southern prowess could not always
prevail against theirs. Papa ceased to question it, I noticed;
though mamma's sneers grew more intense as the occasion for
them grew less and less obvious.
The winter passed, and the spring came; and moved on with its
sweet step of peace, as it does even when men's hearts are all
at war. The echo of the battlefields of Virginias wept through
the Boulevards with met often; and it thundered at home. Mamma
had burst into new triumph at the news of Chancellorsville;
and uttered with great earnestness her wish that Jefferson
Davis might be able to execute the threat of his proclamation
and hang General Butler. But for me, I got no letter; and
these echoes began to sound in my ear like the distant outside
rumblings of the storm to one whose hearthstone it has already
swept and laid desolate. I was not desolate; yet I began to
listen as one whose ears were dim with listening. I met
Faustina St. Clair again with uneasiness. Not the torment of
my former jealousy; but a stir of doubt and pain which I could
not repress at the sight of her.